EVER SINCE THE Journal started back in 2010, our readers and their thoughts have been fundamental to our coverage of the news. Here’s what you’ve been saying to us this week. Have something to say? Send a mail to letters@thejournal.ie. You can see our letter guidelines here.

Would you like to have a letter published? See guidelines for submission here.

Wait times for GPs

Dear Editor,

Why does it take 7 to 14 days to see my GP? Time was you walked in before 11am and saw him that day. I’m 82 years old and have to wait up to ten days for an appointment. It’s a joke.

My GP says it’s all about demand and there are not enough doctors, but my GP is off on Mondays and takes a half-day on Wednesday, so they end up doing a 5.5-hour day for 3.5 days a week. That works out at 19.5 total hours per week.  It’s a shortage of hours, more like.

Nice work if you can get it.

Yours respectfully,

Joe Barry

***

Ireland at Cop 31

[Ireland takes lead for EU at climate summit as UN warns planet in 'new age of extremes']

Dear Editor,

Global leaders gathered in Antalya this week for COP31 must ensure that previously committed funding, which will enable lower -income countries to adapt to the growing impact of climate change, begins to flow.

At this COP, we need to see world leaders shift from funding commitments to funding delivery, with the necessary urgency of a climate crisis.

Climate change is hitting hardest in fragile and conflict-affected countries that are home to almost one billion people. These contexts, where climate finance is desperately needed, are the contexts where conventional climate finance is often hardest to access.

At COP31, there must be greater recognition of the specific barriers facing fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Countries need adequate resources, capacity, and technical support to deliver national adaptation plans, and translate these into action from national to local levels, ensuring that people most vulnerable to the impact of climate change are supported.

It is vital that adaptation action reflects local realities. The recent floods in Nepal and Bangladesh demonstrate how quickly communities can lose homes, livelihoods, and access to essential services, and how overwhelming and expensive the task of recovery and rebuilding is.

Recovery cannot simply mean rebuilding what was lost. It must also mean recognising the true human cost of climate change, and commitment to adequately address the vulnerabilities that leave communities exposed to repeated shocks.

Yours sincerely,

Laura Bahlman,
Global Advocacy Advisor for Climate Resilience,
Concern Worldwide,
52-55 Lower Camden Street,
Dublin 2.

***

Ireland’s hare population

Dear Editor,

The government must act urgently to protect what’s left of our persecuted hare population

A wildlife ranger in County Limerick recently warned that the use of thermal imaging scopes by illegal hunters may lead to localised extinction of hares.

This device enables hunters to spot a hare even when it’s well-concealed in undergrowth or ensconced in a dairy paddock. Every warm-blooded creature gives off a heat signature that the scope can pick up, so that a hare, for all its legendary speed and agility and virtual 360-degree vision, has no chance against this technology. The hunter can get close enough to the animal without disturbing it and then release the dogs.

Gardaí seized a scope in a County Limerick illegal hunting case last month, but hares nationwide are now susceptible to this form of hi-tech predation.

Animal welfare aside, scoping can only exacerbate the hare’s already precarious conservation status. We’re several weeks into the new coursing season, with hares being captured and forced to run from dogs, a practice causing acute disturbance to habitat in addition to the kind of stress levels that can lead to hare mortality, even days after coursing.

We need a new national hare survey to determine the current conservation status of the species. The 2018 one is out of date, given the upsurge in targeting of this vulnerable species by both legal and illegal sportspeople.

A complete moratorium on any killing of hares, by coursing, hunting or shooting, is long overdue. It needs to be removed completely from the Open Seasons Order.

This gentle creature, a subspecies of the mountain hare unique to Ireland, is a time-honoured feature of the Irish landscape. It survived an Ice Age and has been here for up to 60,000 years.

We stand to lose it unless politicians wake up to the fact that it’s part of our island wildlife heritage that belongs to all of us. The hare is not the preserve of a heartless minority that gets a thrill from killing or tormenting it, or wrecking its habitat that’s already being decimated by urbanisation, urban sprawl, and aggressive 21st century land management.

With the stroke of a pen, the government can reverse its pitiable plight.

Otherwise, the hare may become an absentee heritage icon: existing only in folklore, old paintings, and the dusty pages of our past.

Thanking you,

Sincerely

John Fitzgerald
Callan
Co Kilkenny